Creating Your Targeted Keyword List in Google

Welcome back to our incredibly useful series on conversion optimization! If you’ve been following along since the beginning of our series, you will have now covered everything needed to begin setup on your search engine optimization work, and will now be ready to actually set it up. If you’re just joining us, I highly recommend heading back to part 1 and reviewing everything leading up to this point so you will be perfectly prepared for the next steps.

In our most recent post, we covered all of the necessary tools you will need in order to get set up with Google Adwords. In order to use any of the tools we went over, you will first need to compile a list of pertinent keywords that apply to your business and will resonate with your audience. The best tool to use when initially compiling this list is the Google Adwords Keyword Planner. To set this up and begin using this, you will need to set up an account with Adwords.

Once your Adwords account is set up and ready to go, you can now begin your work on your keywords. This planning can also be useful when you want to plan out your keywords for an Adwords campaign, but for this post, we will be planning to use them for content creation and website optimization purposes only.

Once you are logged into your Adwords account, navigate to the tools dropdown at the top of the page, and select Keyword Planner. From there, you can then begin to enter keywords that surround your business and your industry, basically encompassing anything that surrounds what it is that you do. To start off, we recommend entering no more than 50 keywords, as any more starts to clutter up the fields and bog down the good terms.

Once all of your keywords have been entered, there are many different tools you can use to analyze and set up your plan. If you are using this for your Adwords campaigns, it will give you an idea of what the daily forecast would look like for each keyword, as well as how many impressions it would get you per day – quite valuable information to make sure your campaign is performing as well as it can be.

This can also be extremely useful for PPC utilization and planning as well if you will be entering the world of PPC. For this, you can enter a bid and your daily budget, and it will then show you approximately how many clicks and impressions you would be able to get for each. Again, this is valuable information, especially since you will want to maximize your spending for each campaign.

At the bottom of the Keyword Planner, you are given the option to download and export your keywords. Once you do, it spits out your entire keyword list, including certain metrics and information for each term. Certain pieces of this aren’t necessarily relevant though, so we usually cut these metrics down to include just the pieces we care about.

In our case, we tend to only keep the keywords, average monthly searches, and competition. This allows us to keep it simple and easy to track the important metrics, but feel free to include as much or as little information as you feel necessary for your brand.

The last important step in this process is to make sure you keep your keyword spreadsheet up to date. As your campaign/brand evolves over time, your keyword list will also evolve and you will want to add or delete certain terms. Whenever you plan to begin targeting a certain term more on the site, you should also plan to add it to the spreadsheet for easy tracking. If you keep this list up to date over time, the easier it will be to stay organized and analyze how they are doing.

Get Started
Now that you’ve seen how to get acquainted with the necessary tools, jump right in and get started with your own keywords! If you’re not sure where to start, download our free keyword planner worksheet here! A document like this helps keep your keywords simple and organized, and allows for easy tracking and updating down the line. We highly recommend using this or something similar to this when setting up your own plan.